Notre Dame junior Allison Emeott didn’t just study Korean this summer. She was immersed in it. “You get to use what you learn and talk to people,” she said. “It’s really inspiring because when you’re surrounded by people speaking a language, you want to learn more and you just want to become a part of the community." Emeott, an applied mathematics and Asian studies major, spent the summer of 2015 intensively studying in Seoul, South Korea. Sponsored by the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures in the College of Arts and Letters, she received a grant from the Summer Language Abroad program, which provides funding up to $5,500 for individual summer foreign language study abroad.

The young people of war-torn northern Colombia want their homes and their lifestyle back. Displaced from their villages by guerilla and paramilitary groups, they have spent the last 10 years in urban centers—making them prime targets for recruitment by those same criminal enterprises. But rather than falling prey to a violent cause, they’ve founded a successful peace-building movement. Notre Dame Ph.D. student Angela Lederach ’07 wants to know why. She’s spent the last two summers living in Cartagena, Colombia, researching the Peaceful Movement of the Alta Montaña, and plans to return in August for at least a year to continue researching the organization for her dissertation.

Jennifer Jones, an assistant professor in Notre Dame’s Department of Sociology, has received the Presidential Authority Award grant from the Russell Sage Foundation for her study of interracial coalitions and their effect on immigration policy in Mississippi and Alabama. Combining archival and media sources with interviews, “Enforcement or Embrace? The Determinants of State-Level Immigration Policy in New Immigrant Destinations” emerged from unexpected patterns Jones identified while researching race relations and immigration in North Carolina.

“Studying Chinese opens the doors to different ways of thinking,” said junior John Fox. “It helped a lot to be able to come here and study abroad this summer and to experience such a great city.” Fox was one of several Notre Dame students to participate in the 2015 China Summer Language Program through the Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures in the College of Arts and Letters. Students honed their Chinese language skills at Peking University in Beijing, both in the classroom and one-on-one with an instructor. Students in the program typically advance the equivalent of one full year of study in just eight weeks.

Robert Vargas, an urban sociologist whose research focuses on violence and health care, is joining Notre Dame’s Department of Sociology this fall as an assistant professor. Vargas, who will also be a faculty affiliate in the Institute for Latino Studies at Notre Dame, was previously on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a fellow at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation at Harvard University. Vargas’ first book, Wounded City: Violent Turf Wars in a Chicago Barrio (Oxford University Press), will be released May 1. In it, Vargas argues that competition among political groups contributes to the persistence of violence just as much as the competition among street gangs.

Carter Snead, William P. and Hazel B. White Director of the University of Notre Dame’s "Center for Ethics and Culture and professor of law, has been appointed to the Pontifical Academy for Life, the pope’s principal advisory group on the promotion of the consistent ethic of life in the Catholic Church.Founded in 1994 by Saint Pope John Paul II, the academy meets annually, holds conferences, publishes reports and collaborates with partners in the Vatican Curia and worldwide.

Inspired by her extensive research on a 10th-century German empress, Ph.D. candidate Megan Welton set her sights early on a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), which provides funding for American students to study in Germany. Her patience and planning paid off recently, when she was awarded the scholarship to study for a year in Essen. “My success in winning a DAAD fellowship is directly linked with the immense support that I have received as a part of the Medieval Institute and as part of the wider Notre Dame community,” she said.

Seung-Jae “David” Oh, a senior history major, spent the summer of 2015 in Seoul doing archival research at the Diplomatic Archives of Korea. He gathered documents produced by the South Korean foreign ministry to get a better understanding of the bilateral relationship between South Korea and the United States. His research, supported in part by the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, will inform his senior thesis, focusing on a tumultuous period between 1979 and 1983 when a movement for democracy clashed with South Korea’s authoritarian government.

A new report by the University of Notre Dame’s Institute for Latino Studies examines how gender affects Latino men’s and women’s savings for retirement and concludes that there is a need to develop programs to empower lower-income women and men to save for retirement. The research report, directed by Karen Richman, a Notre Dame cultural anthropologist, applies a novel, interdisciplinary approach to the role gender plays in Latinos’ inability to save for retirement, combining anthropological and economic theories and methods.

The gala premiere of 1916: The Irish Rebellion, a three-part documentary produced by the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, will be held March 3 in Notre Dame’s DeBartolo Performing Arts Center. Narrated by Liam Neeson, who will attend the gala premiere, the film was conceived, written, and co-produced by Briona Nic Dhiarmada, Thomas J. & Kathleen M. O’Donnell Chair of Irish Language and Literature. The first documentary to give a comprehensive account of the 1916 Rising in Dublin, the film has been made a centerpiece of the Irish government’s global centenary commemoration of the Easter Rising, and will air on 255 U.S. public television stations.

Fourteen University of Notre Dame students have been awarded Fulbright grants in the 2015-16 program, placing the University among the top-producing universities in the nation. The Fulbright program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program. It awards a one-year postgraduate fellowship for research, study or teaching English abroad. During their fellowship, scholars will work, live and learn in their host country.

Michel Hockx has been appointed director of the University of Notre Dame’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies within the new Keough School of Global Affairs. Hockx is professor of Chinese and director of the China Institute at SOAS, University of London. He will join the Notre Dame faculty in August 2016 and teach in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures within the College of Arts and Letters.

Celia Deane-Drummond, professor of theology, and Agustín Fuentes, professor and chair of the Department of Anthropology, have been awarded a grant by the John Templeton Foundation to convene invited scholars to explore the intersection of wisdom, humility, and grace in human evolution. An advanced symposium, entitled “Humility, Wisdom, and Grace in Deep Time: A Conversation between Theology and Evolutionary Anthropology,” will assemble scholars from around the world in Stellenbosch, South Africa, in January 2017.

Through the liberal arts, you learn to read deeply. Think about issues critically. Discuss topics thoughtfully. Write arguments persuasively. Contribute to projects creatively. And these abilities aren’t just vital in the classroom—they’re exactly what employers, graduate schools, and service organizations are looking for. With 20 departments across the humanities, arts, and social sciences, the College of Arts and Letters is home to exceptional faculty and talented students who are studying what they love.

Through the Washington Program, a semester-long immersion into national politics and policy, Notre Dame students head to the nation’s capital for coursework and organized visits with policymakers, journalists, and leaders in a variety of governmental and non-governmental offices. Participants also complete internships at the White House, congressional offices, major media outlets, non-governmental organizations, and nonprofits.

Robert Schmuhl is the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Professor of American Studies and Journalism at the University of Notre Dame. He received the 2014 Hibernian Research Award in support of his forthcoming book, Ireland’s Exiled Children: America and the Easter Rising, which will be released by Oxford University Press next month, just in time to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916.

When Pope Francis travels to Mexico Feb. 12-17, he will visit six cities—including two in the state of Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state—and will celebrate a Mass in Ciudad Juárez across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. The first pope from Latin America, where 40 percent of the world’s Catholics live, he will be touring the country that’s home to the second largest Catholic population in the world.

The Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures has partnered with the Kaneb Center for Teaching and Learning to offer the Ursula Williams Faculty Fellowship. The fellowship connects foreign-language faculty with technology experts and supports research to help faculty members determine which technological tools are most helpful in language classrooms. Chengxu Yin, associate teaching professor of Chinese, was awarded the fellowship to develop a hybrid model language class, blending traditional class time with online learning.

Political Science Professor Michael Desch has been appointed director of the Notre Dame International Security Center. “This is both a tremendous honor and a daunting challenge,” Desch said. “My colleagues and I have made much progress since 2008 in building NDISC into a leading center for international security studies. But our challenge now is to take it to the next level in terms of both the scope of our programming as well as its impact on campus and in the academic and policy communities more broadly.”

Pierpaolo Polzonetti, an associate professor in Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies (PLS) and Sacred Music at Notre Dame program, has won the H. Colin Slim Award for his essay, “Tartini and the Tongue of Saint Anthony.” The award, presented by the American Musicological Society since 2005, honors a “musicological article of exceptional merit.”

Before the rigors of post-college life set in—before mortgages, family, a career, and all the other responsibilities that come with setting off into the world—Kaitlin Sullivan ’10 wanted to devote at least one year of her life to service. Sullivan remembers talking with professors and fellow students at Notre Dame about how the purpose of their education wasn’t just learning for the sake of learning, but to help them to go out and do good in the world. It’s a perspective she carried into her service experience—and in her professional career as a product policy manager for Facebook.

Pope Francis has ignited increased public interest in the future of the Catholic Church, and Kathleen Sprows Cummings hopes she can use that to remind people of the Church’s past. Cummings, an associate professor of American studies and history and the William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at Notre Dame, begins her term this month as vice president/president-elect of the American Catholic Historical Association.

In the summer of 2015, Emily Campagna interned at Oracle Japan, handling a variety of responsibilities, including competitor analysis, mid-market analysis to help find new clients, and research to improve the company’s employee culture. Sponsored by Notre Dame’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, the Oracle Japan Summer Internship program supports successful applicants in a project-based internship experience at the Tokyo offices of Oracle, a world-leader in cloud computing and software services.

Beginning on Jan. 18, the University of Notre Dame will host a weeklong series of events, called Walk the Walk Week, to reflect on the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and encourage dialogue about diversity and inclusion.

Notre Dame sociologist Ann Mische, a scholar of social movements in Brazil and around the world, has an intense interest in how citizens in a democracy debate their futures and engage in collective efforts to bring about social and political change. In her work, she investigates processes and styles of communication and decision making across civil society networks and their implications for democracy, development, and social justice.

Unless you have a conversation to really understand culture, you can’t make effective change. That’s what Emily Campbell ’17 learned during her Kellogg Institute Experiencing the World fellowship last summer. Her experience in Rwanda focused her future academic work, affirmed her career goals, and motivated her to make lasting international development change.

A five-year collaboration between institutions in the United States and Sweden has resulted in a new, public dataset for researchers of democracy. According to Notre Dame political scientist and Kellogg Faculty Fellow Michael Coppedge, one of four principal investigators who have led the five-year effort, the data release promises to “revolutionize” quantitative research on democracy.

Three faculty from the University of Notre Dame received fellowships this week from the National Endowment for the Humanities, continuing the University’s record success winning support for humanities research. Receiving the grants are Julia Douthwaite, a professor of French; Amy Mulligan, an assistant professor of Irish language and literature; and Gabriel Said Reynolds, a professor of Islamic studies and theology. Since 1999, College of Arts and Letters faculty have won 57 NEH fellowships—more than any other private university in the country.

The Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures in Notre Dame’s College of Arts and Letters is launching a new minor in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). The program offers students the opportunity to study linguistics education, learn how to teach English, and develop classroom management and lesson planning skills.

During the summer of 2015, Notre Dame history and political science major Matt Souza interviewed laborers in multiple Chinese cities. The goal of his research was to determine whether the official ideology of the Communist Party is still influential amongst Chinese citizens. “All of my findings, they’re actually quite different from all the previous research, and I really want to get my ideas and all my findings out to the public,” he said. Souza’s research was supported by the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program in the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts.